Yeah, is it interesting in that they were worried about the folks selling the Underground Records on Telegraph, like Mammary Productions, but at the same time ok with us tape trading and so on (ie, the idea that sharing was okay but making LPs and selling them wasn't...obviously, they couldn't control what folks did with these tapes, and in fact, radio broadcasts were often used for just that--some of the best bootlegs were from early broadcasts).

But I wouldn't think they could tell the difference by looking at a taper. When they busted this guy, they thought he was taping to make a record; were they, at the same time, saying it was OK to trade tapes? Wonder when Jerry actually said "when we're done with it, they can have it" for the first time ...

It's a classic moment. Yes, they would have assumed tapers were bootleggers; Dead tape trading basically didn't exist at that point. It wasn't until around '73 that tape-trading became more widely known among Dead fans; til the mid-'70s most people had to get Dead shows via bootleg records or radio broadcasts. When Relix magazine started in '74/75 it became a lot easier to find tape traders.

Of course, you could also point to Weir's 8/6/71 comment to the tapers to move back for better sound; or Phil's complimenting Marty Weinberg in Dec '71 on his bootleg LP - even though their usual policy at that point was to bust tapers (as we can hear on a lot of cut-off '70-73 audience tapes). This was a band of contradictions!

Wow. That's quite a story - and quite a perspective. The writer sure has the whole Power To The People/Down With the Pigs attitude down. Great find; it's easy to forget in hindsight how absolutely rabid people could get with the "revolutionary" rhetoric.

I had to google Basho Katzenjammer. He turns up again in the '90s, calling Alexander Cockburn "shit for brains." Also he wrote a Cartoon History of Sex and claimed to be writing a history of the 60s. So that's how he lived out the "revolution to come."